APIs can’t help cure COVID-19, but they can be used by developers to collect data about the outbreak, track its spread, and even produce data visualizations. Over the past month, ProgrammableWeb has been tracking APIs that provide access to data related to the pandemic. Here are 30 APIs that let developers leverage the available data about the virus.

#1 About Corona COVID-19

The About Corona COVID-19 API provides statistics via REST API from the World Health Organization Situation Reports, Johns Hopkins CSSE, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and China CDC Weekly.

This API retrieves data by country including population, the number of cases confirmed, recovered, critical cases, deaths, recovered per death ratio, cases per million population, and more. The data is updated multiple times a day.

#2 Bing COVID-19 Data

The Bing COVID-19 Data API provides total confirmed cases, deaths, and recoveries by country. Data is sourced from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The API is used as a source for a live map tracker from Microsoft Bing.

The Bing COVID-19 Data API is the source for a live map tracker from Microsoft Bing. Source: Microsoft

#3 COVID19INDIA API

The COVID19INDIA API is a Coronavirus tracker for cases in India. The API returns daily confirmed cases, daily deceased cases, and daily recovered cases as time-series data. This information is also available cumulatively and per district.

#4 COVID-19-REPORT

The COVID-19-REPORT API tracks COVID-19 cases worldwide. Developers can retrieve brief reports, brief time series, latest cases in the world or in a specific region or country.

#5 Coronavirus Data

The Coronavirus Data API enables COVID-19 information sourced from Johns Hopkins CSSE. The API returns cases by country and are updated daily. A streaming API that tracks this API is also available that uses Webhooks to notify when new daily data is retrieved.

#6 api-covid-19-india

The api-covid-19-india API retrieves daily statistics, hospital and bed numbers, contact and helplines, and notifications. It also displays unofficial patient tracing data, unofficial statewide information, and unofficial patient travel history. Data is sourced from The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare as the official source and the India COVID-19 Tracker as an unofficial source.

#7 UK Coronavirus Data

The UK Coronavirus Data API serves as a data crawler to get COVID-19 figures from The National Health Service’s official website.

#9 Ghana COVID-19

The Ghana COVID 19 API returns data about COVID-19 cases in Ghana and the world. Information includes confirmed and recovered cases. This API is built by independent developer Zakaria Mohammed.

#10 COVID2019

COVID2019-API provides information about COVID-19. The API provides data on confirmed cases, deaths, recovered cases, and affected countries. This information is updated on a daily basis and is provided as time-series data.

#11 COVID19 Real-Time Data

The COVID19 Real-Time Data API provides updated information related to coronavirus including the total count of cases, task force data in the U.S., travel health notices, cases in all U.S. states, and fatality rates by age and sex.

#12 Robert-Koch Institut COVID-19 Data

An API for the spread of COVID-19 in Germany and worldwide. Case numbers and deaths are available via the API.

#13 COVID Tracking Project API

The COVID Tracking Project is a volunteer effort, maintained through a partnership of The Atlantic and the founder of Related Sciences, that aims to be the most reliable source of state-level testing data through time. A RESTful API is available that tracks data on a state-level as well as for the entire U.S. Additionally, a GraphQL version of the API is also available.

#14 Coronavirus Tracker API

The Coronavirus Tracker is a simple API for tracking the COVID-19 outbreak that comes from Norwegian developer ExpDev. Users can query the RESTful API to get data about confirmed cases, deaths, and the number of recovered patients. Data sources include the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE), and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. Community SDKs are also available in eight languages.

#15 Covidapi.info API

The covidapi.info API builds upon the COVID-19 dataset of John Hopkins University. The data, originally in CSV format has been standardized and converted into queryable REST API endpoints. The endpoints are heavily cached and updated three times a day with a response time of sub 100 milliseconds. This API was built by developer Saiprasad Balasubramanian and contributors.

#16 Health Promotion Bureau COVID-19 API

The Health Promotion Bureau (HPB) is a government agency in Sri Lanka charged with promoting health education and publicizing health information. The HPB has released an API that aims to make accurate information about COVID-19 patients, updated in real-time, available to the media. It is a RESTful API with responses formatted in JSON.

#17 Springer Open Access API

The Springer Open Access API provides metadata and full-text content for more than 649,000 online documents from Springer Nature open access, including BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals. The API offers access to the latest available research, evidence, and data. Any COVID-related content is currently free.

#18 Coronavirus API

The Coronavirus REST API returns the current cases and more information about COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus strain. This API is free to use and requires no authentication. The API returns JSON formatted responses. The API supports country-specific responses. Additionally, a Node.js SDK is available to developers.

#19 Nubentos COVID-19 Tracking API

This API is from the self-proclaimed API marketplace for health, and it aims to provide valuable resources for tracking the novel coronavirus. It provides developers access to data collected from global health organizations and local administrations including the World Health Organization (WHO), U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), China’s National Health Commission, and the Chinese Website DXY. You can read here for our coverage of the API.

#20 Health Gorilla Diagnostic Network API

Health Gorilla, a provider of clinical data interoperability, recently released this API to allow providers to submit orders for laboratory or radiology tests and receive the results electronically from vendors such as Labcorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Bioreference. The API can now be used to place COVID-19 test orders.

#21 New South Wales COVID-19 Cases API

This API, from developer Adam Lusted, provides the latest data about the coronavirus outbreak in New South Wales, Australia. Developers can use GET calls to query the number of confirmed cases, cases under investigation, cases acquired overseas, cases under investigation, and their respective reference sources.

#22 Smartable AI COVID-19 Stats and News API

Smartable AI is a company that uses AI to fight misinformation, curate content, and put information in order. It’s free COVID-19 Stats and News API offers recent and historic COVID-19 stats and news information per country or state. This is done in close to real-time by using AI to gather information from a number of data sources. Check out ProgrammableWeb‘s full coverage of the API.

#23 COVID-19 GraphQL API

The first GraphQL API focused on the coronavirus comes from Ryan Lindskog. It enables mutable queries about COVID-19 and supports time-series data associated with deaths and cases by country. Additionally, the API returns the most recent confirmed cases per country. Data comes from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE).

#24 Health API

This is a RESTful API that also leverages JHU CSSE as its data source. It returns aggregated statistics (with total confirmed cases, deaths, and recovered), and country statistics.

#25 TheVirusTracker Coronavirus Data API

TheVirusTracker is a real-time service that tracks the coronavirus and provides updated news and data from outlets worldwide. The API is free to use and offers four data options related to COVID-19: global stats, country stats, full timeline, and country timeline.

#26 Octoparse

Octoparse is a web-scraping tool that includes an API for retrieving extracted data and using it in an application. Octoparse recently created a “recipe” that lets users extract live data from China Healthcare Department’s database.

#27 GHO OData API

With the GHO portal, users can query the World Health Organization’s data and statistics content. Data available includes various health indicators and the data associated with them, and dimensions such as education level and the data associated with them. The API uses the Open Data Protocol (OData) and supports both JSON and ATOM data formats.

#28 ReliefWeb API

ReliefWeb is a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Content on this site including the latest reports, maps, and infographics from trusted sources, is delivered through the API. The API was used to create a daily map that tracks the outbreak among citizens of the EU.

The ReliefWeb API is used to create a daily map tracking the coronavirus outbreak. Image: OCHA

#29 Aylien News API

This API isn’t specifically aimed at tracking the coronavirus, but it is used to monitor worldwide news outlets in real-time to provide users with a news data feed. The Aylien team created a visualization that follows the spread of news coverage since the start of the year. The team used the News API to “map and analyze media reaction to the outbreak, plotting where and when the major events and announcements occurred.” The API itself returns parsed and analyzed news articles as JSON objects.

The Aylien News API was used to create a visualization showing the spread of news coverage of the virus outbreak. Source: Aylien blog

#30OpenCage Geocoder API

This is another API that isn’t directly related to tracking data about the coronavirus. Instead, OpenCage Geocoder provides forward and reverse geocoding services via a RESTful API. The coronavirus Global Outbreak Monitor is a dashboard that pulls data from several sources to visualize and track the most recent reported cases on a daily basis. This dashboard uses the OpenCage Geocoder API to call the coordinates of new cases of the disease. Interested developers can learn about how the dashboard was built.

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